I'm just wondering what everyone's preference is. So when you buy some new yarn do you wind it into a ball? Or do you just work directly from the skein? I always just work from the skein. I don't have a ball winder, and I'm entirely too lazy to do it by hand. I have also started pulling from the outside, instead of the inside of the skein. I know that makes the skein roll around constantly, but I HATE when the inside body is gone and you get this limp noodle of yarn :/

it kind of depends on the yarn and how big the skien is. i definately don't ball up the big one pound skeins. smaller ones i usually ball up. but if i don't i usually pull from the outside as well. too many times i've started pulling from the middle just to enounter a huge knot that takes forever to undo. yarn i've spun myself i always ball up.

I work from skeins by preference and pull it from the middle. While I'm working, I put my skein or occasional ball (I get yarn from thrift stores as balls) inside a big glass candy jar like this one. I just view yarn-barf as par for the course

I usually pull from the middle of the skein. I'm too impatient to sit and wind it up by hand; I want to get started on whatever project I'm working on. When it gets to the limp noodle stage, if it isn't attatched to a project, sometimes I'll sit and wind it up into a ball.

Well, I'm technically a knitter, but this topic keeps catching my eye. I like to work from balls, the first few projects I did I worked from the skein & it frustrated me so, so, so much to encounter knots or tangles that got in my way of working on my project. So for me, I prefer to take the time to wind them into a ball to get past all of those tangles before they stop me in the middle of a project.

So, if you wind it into a ball, do you pull from the center or outside? Do you still get the yucky collapsible yarn mess if you pull from the middle of the ball?

I know how to wind a center-pull ball, but I prefer to wind a normal ball & pull from the outside. Now that I think about it, if I were to wind a center-pull I'd want to rewind anything that is left over, so winding without the center-pull makes more sense to me for the way I like to work & store my yarn. And also, thinking about it, it would probably collapse from a center-pull, it's pretty much the same thing just a different shape, right? But I've never done a big center-pull ball, so who knows how it would work with a larger ball. lol